“Nick…” I begin to protest but stop short on making any definitive statements.
And then his hand is on the side of my face, pawing at me gently at first, and then he’s kissing me. We shouldn’t do this. We’ve been down this road before and it never ends well, but I don’t resist. And then he’s devouring me. Kissing. Biting. Chewing. He pushes me back onto the bed as he twists onto his feet as he stands.
There’s nothing left to say, nothing left to talk about. He raises my legs and rips my sweatpants from my body. He undoes the buckle of his jeans in one swift motion and hurries out of them.
And then he’s climbing on top of me, parting my knees with the weight of his muscular body. He buries his face in the crook of my neck, breathing hot fire in between soft bites. My hands claw underneath the fabric of his shirt, holding firm at the muscles in his upper back.
I’m drawn to him, and I can’t explain why. He’s tortured, damaged beyond belief. Staring into his eyes is like staring at my own reflection. At times, it can be terrifying. Mostly, it’s something else entirely. It’s entropy, a flywheel of passion always on the verge of self-destruction. We can never be truly honest with each other, as if words of truth would only serve to magnify the fissures in the shaky ground beneath us.
We are two souls cloaked in darkness, lost in dueling acts of charades. One of these days, one of our masks will fall. Only then will the consequences of our actions add up to anything more than toying with the inevitableness of destruction. The fallout will leave behind a desolate wasteland of collateral damage, a spider web of betrayal and secrets threatening to ruin the lives of everyone it touches.
And he can never know the full truth, which is plagued by another tapestry of lies spun by the people he believes he can trust.
I cock my head away from him, turning to the side to stare at the surveillance video as it continues to play on the laptop. As Nick devours my neck and ears with his mouth, as he tangles his fingers around the thin fabric of my panties, I stare at the screen. I watch as the incriminating footage plays on loop, every ten seconds or so, I’m stabbing Carter in the stomach with the carving knife.
He retreats slightly, his hot, sweaty face hovering over mine. His eyes wage war with my own. Dark, stormy, and needy. Out of sight, out of mind, I reach over and close the laptop.
The Hamptons is nothing more than a broken kingdom on the verge of societal collapse. If Nick is the prince of the playground for the rich, then his father is the king. He’s untouchable, but behind the veil of power, the walls are closing in on him because the only certainty in kingdoms old and new is that the king always falls.
Nick gasps for air as he rips my panties at the side. He pushes his jeans down the curves of his taut ass, and I can see the internal struggle. He’s torn just the same. He wants to fuck me as deep into the squeaky mattress as humanly possible and then he wants to flee. Fucking hell, there’s probably a part of him that still wants to kill me. I can’t tell the difference anymore, as if I ever could. He feels something when he’s with me, though. I know this because I feel the same.
It used to be disgust and hatred, back when we clawed each other’s clothes from our bodies in a desperate attempt to pretend that the attraction between was nothing more than a game. It’s undeniable now that we were both fighting another battle entirely.
I don’t love him.
I don’t think I can ever truly love anybody.
But I love the way he feels dangerous and distant, never letting me in. He’s like a beautiful ghost, the fabric of his being constructed of the broken parts of others. We’re equally fucked up for different reasons, but when we fuck, we can pretend that we’re not.
Pretend that we haven’t committed the worst sins.
Pretend that pretending isn’t pretending at all.
Pretend that things will get better, but I know that they won’t because they can’t.
Not when I’m still lying.
I killed the prom king and I would do it again, but the truth really is stranger than fiction. A tiger can’t change her spots and I can’t become something that I’m not. Nick’s father knows the truth about what happened that day. He knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that I killed his youngest child and yet he allows me to walk free.
And I’m going to figure out why, even if that means pretending when I look into Nick’s eyes as he sinks into me. I let out a gasp and throw a hand around the back of his head, and as he fills himself to the hilt, I whisper into his ear. “I’m pregnant.”
And the fucked-up thing is that it might not even be a lie.